Ice Breakers: Could Stone injury open space for Vegas to activate Eichel?

Jack Eichel is inching closer and closer to a return from his neck surgery and making his debut with the Vegas Golden Knights.

However, with that comes another issue for the Golden Knights, as they find themselves in need of cap space in order to activate Eichel’s $10 million cap hit on the roster.

As Frank Seravalli and Mike McKenna discussed on today’s Daily Faceoff Show, could a large chunk of that cap space come by potentially placing captain Mark Stone on LTIR?

McKenna: “There’s been a lot of talk about the names of the Vegas Golden Knights that could potentially be on the move now that Jack Eichel is close. He’s taking full contact in practice, can’t be too far away, I’ve seen that as a player, once you start taking contact, it’s pretty close.

So, who could possibly be on the move for the Vegas Golden Knights, if anybody? Will there be somebody on the move? Is it possible that they don’t have to make one?”

Seravalli: “It is possible, and I don’t know what the Vegas Golden Knights are going to do, but I can tell you from talking to people around the league that there were a lot of eyebrows that perked up on Wednesday night when Mark Stone missed the game and Pete DeBoer confirmed afterwards that this is a reoccurrence of the back injury that caused him to miss 29 days earlier in the season.

And immediately, rival general managers from around the league have begun to talk. Is this the opportunity, is this the option that the Vegas Golden Knights are going to take in order to activate Jack Eichel, and have him return to the lineup?

The belief is, and again, we’ll see how the Golden Knights play this in the coming days, is that Stone is suffering from a degenerative back condition that may keep him out long term. Maybe until the playoffs? That’s the big question mark. And Stone, if his $9.5 million salary is moved to the long term injured reserve, that would open up enough space not just for the Vegas Golden Knights to activate Jack Eichel, but the other big part of the equation that hasn’t been talked about nearly as much is defenseman Alec Martinez, who continues to work his way back from a facial injury that he suffered earlier in the season.

It depends on who you talk to, but a lot of sources seem to suggest that Alec Martinez is getting very close. He was involved in some battle drills earlier this week, I believe on Wednesday, including against Jack Eichel in practice, so he’s taking contact. It gives you an indication that he’s inching closer and closer to a return.

In order to activate Jack Eichel and Alec Martinez at the same time, the Golden Knights would need to clear almost $11 million in salary cap space, I believe the exact number is $10.95 million. Moving Mark Stone to the long term injured list at $9.5 (million) would get them a significant chunk of that.

So instead of moving what teams assumed all along was potentially Reilly Smith or Evgeni Dadonov or maybe even a Jonathan Marchessault, they may not need to go down that path, and then could simply, at the point that Mark Stone gets healthy, if it’s in the playoffs, activate Mark Stone when there is no salary cap.

Again, not to raise alarms, don’t know what the Vegas Golden Knights are going to do, don’t know completely the severity of Mark Stone and his injury, all I can tell you is that is exactly what rival general managers have begun to talk about.

Is this an avenue for the Vegas Golden Knights to move forward, and if so, will the NHL allow something like that to happen? You could see a lot of teams crying foul if Mark Stone were to go down with this injury now after playing for a significant period of time to then ultimately be activated for the playoffs using that loophole that some other teams have used.

We’ll see what ends up happening there, but that is what teams are talking about today.”

You can watch the full episode here…